Although adult smoking rates have fallen to the current 18 percent from 43 percent of Americans in 1965, each day, more than 3,200 youths under the age 18 try their first cigarette, the U.S. surgeon general's report found, Fox News reports.
"Enough is enough," acting Surgeon General Dr Boris Lushniak said in a telephone interview. "We need to eliminate the use of cigarettes and create a tobacco-free generation."
The report, dubbed The Health Consequences of Smoking, 50 Years of Progress, details the growing science showing the diseases and health conditions caused by smoking since Dr Luther Terry issued the landmark report on Jan. 11, 1964, that first confirmed smoking tobacco caused lung cancer.
The new report adds liver and colorectal cancer to that list, but it also details several other conditions caused by smoking, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and impaired immune function, and cleft palate in infants.
And in a startling statistic, the report found that exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of stroke by 20 to 30 percent.
Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reiterated that tobacco control efforts have saved as many as 8 million lives in the past 50 years, but stressed that much more needs to be done to eliminate smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
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